The Extinction Files: The Complete Series, page 62
“Millen. It’s Peyton Shaw.”
She could hear him walking away, exiting a room where people were talking. “Dr. Shaw. How are you?”
“Just fine, Millen. Listen, I’m short on time, so I’ll get right to it. I’m putting together a team for a new type of investigation. It’s not CDC. It’s a cross-sectional group. Are you interested?”
“Uh. Maybe. I don’t know. What kind of investigation?”
“A scientific one. With far-reaching implications.” Peyton waited, but Millen made no response. “It involves animals.”
“What kind of animals?” he asked slowly.
“Extinct ones.”
Peyton could hear a pin drop.
“Millen, are you there?”
“Yeah—yeah, I’m definitely here. When would you need me?”
“Tomorrow.”
Silence again. He exhaled deeply. “Look, I’d like to, but there’s something—there’s someone I need to take care of.”
Peyton smiled. “I understand, Millen. It’s a good choice. A really good choice. Tell Hannah I said hi.”
Peyton got out of the car and walked up to the house. When Elliott opened the door, he didn’t say a word. He merely stepped outside and hugged her. Fifteen minutes later, she sat at the dinner table with Elliott, Rose, Ryan, Sam, and Adam.
Elliott looked at each one of them, then said, “Well, I thought since Thanksgiving got just a little interrupted, a do-over was in order.”
He looked Peyton in the eyes. “One with all of our family. If this year has shown us anything, it’s how much we have to be thankful for.”
* * *
The Wait is Over!
Genome, the thrilling conclusion to this series, starts now (simply flip to the next page).
a code hidden in the human genome...
will reveal the ultimate secret of human existence.
and could hold humanity’s only hope of survival.
Genome
The Final book in The Extinction Files
Prologue
July 17, 1941
Adeline’s family left Berlin in the middle of the night. Her father told her they were going on a vacation, but she knew something was wrong. Her parents were too nervous. Her mother had packed too much—and the wrong things: sentimental items and documents from the safe.
For two days and three nights, they lived on the train. They took their meals in the dining car. Her parents played cards in the afternoon. Her father read her favorite book aloud—Alice in Wonderland. The train cars were crowded, mostly with troops and office workers, but also a few families. The adults looked as nervous as Adeline’s parents.
The train was searched periodically. Stone-faced soldiers demanded their papers. Adeline’s mother always held her breath, but her father’s expression was a mirror of the soldiers’.
The Nazi flag hung from the roof of every train station in France, and soldiers crowded the platforms. The searches grew more frequent, the interrogations longer.
At the Spanish border, Adeline was surprised when her father presented a paper to the soldiers and said, “I am conducting research for the betterment of the Reich.”
The SS officer scanned the paper, then eyed Adeline and her mother. “And why have you brought your wife and child?”
“My wife assists me, and my daughter is only five.”
“I asked why she is here, not her age.”
“She is here out of necessity. She simply could not remain in Berlin alone, and we were unable to find anyone for her to stay with.”
The soldier looked unconvinced.
Adeline’s father sighed. “Obersturmführer, if you would like to take my daughter back to Berlin and babysit her for a month until I return, I invite you to do so. It will aid my research greatly.”
Adeline felt her eyes welling with tears. She turned away so no one could see.
The soldier grunted, and loud clicks followed. The passes being stamped, Adeline assumed.
Her mother relaxed when the train started again. Her father moved over beside Adeline and pulled her into a hug. With his lips brushing her ear, he whispered, “That was just a story to make the mean man go away. You’re the whole reason for our trip, my dear. You’ll see.”
He tried to distract her by reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Snow White, and Cinderella.
The train was searched less frequently in Spain. Finally, they disembarked in the small town of Santillana del Mar, just miles from Spain’s northern coast. In the town square, they met up with a dozen men her father said would be helping with his research. Together, they drove out of town, through the countryside, and made camp at the mouth of a cave.
Adeline’s father said it was the Cave of Altamira, and that it was a very important place—a place where messages had been left for them. He and the men spent every spare minute in the cave, only exiting to eat, sleep, and use the restroom.
They had been camping for a week when Adeline’s father woke her one morning, just before dawn. Her mother lay beside her, still asleep in the tent the three of them shared.
“Be quiet, my love,” he whispered.
He led her through the camp, where two men were warming coffee by the fire. He held a battery-powered lantern to light their way.
At the entrance to the cave, he paused and raised his eyebrows. “Ready?”
Adeline nodded, excited.
The cave wasn’t what she expected. One second the passage was wide and tall, the next it was cramped, requiring her father to stoop, and occasionally to crawl. It twisted and turned and branched at random, as if they were in the roots of a giant tree. But her father seemed to know just which way to go, as if he had a map in his head. Adeline felt like Alice after she had gone down the rabbit hole. She was big, and the world around her had grown small and cramped.
Her father stopped and shined the lamp on a wall. Adeline gasped. Red handprints covered it. Some were merely the silhouette of the hand, as if the artist had spray-painted the wall while holding her hand against it.
“It’s a message,” her father whispered. “They’re saying to us, ‘We were here. And we think the way you do. You are in the right place.’”
Adeline held her hand out to touch the wall, but her father caught her. “You mustn’t touch. The art is too fragile. Come, there’s more.”
A few minutes later, her father stopped and squatted down, his face next to hers. “Look up.”
He pointed the electric lamp at the ceiling, revealing a mural of a herd of dark red animals, the size of cows but with dark fur on their backs and legs.
Adeline was speechless. She felt herself wandering, taking in the vast tableau that seemed to have no end. The animals were detailed. The rolling contours of the cave ceiling made some look three-dimensional. Her father stepped back and swept the beam across the ceiling, casting some of the animals in shadow, making the herd look as if it was moving.
“What are they?” Adeline asked.
“Steppe bison.”
Adeline had never heard of the animal.
“They are all dead now,” her father said. “They have been for a long time. Do you know what it means when every member of a species is dead?”
Adeline shook her head.
“They are extinct. This is another message. Can you guess it?”
Adeline thought for a moment. “They hunted bison?”
“Yes. But more. It tells us when. They hunted them a very, very long time ago. They lived a very long time ago. Taken together, the artists are telling us: ‘We were here. We think the way you do. And we lived a very, very long time ago.’”
He led her deeper into the cave, to a painting on the wall. It was a doe, standing alone, regal. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” he whispered.
She nodded.
“Not half as beautiful as you.”
A few feet away, they stopped at a small alcove where several holes had been dug. Metal containers were stacked up.
He opened one, revealing long bones, of legs, Adeline thought. Another held part of a skull.
“These are the artists?” she asked.
“Perhaps. Or someone like them. But these bones are much more. They are part of a larger message, sent across time, waiting for us to find, to study and understand when we’re ready.”
Adeline bunched up her eyebrows.
Her father seemed to read her confusion. “These bones are like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.”
Adeline knew the story well. During a great famine, Hansel and Gretel’s parents were afraid of starving. They were so scared that they led their only two children into the woods and left them there, ridding themselves of two mouths to feed. But Hansel and Gretel dropped bread crumbs along the way, marking the path back home. To the children’s horror, they discover that wolves had eaten the bread crumbs, stranding them in the dangerous wilderness.
Adeline considered the story, but she couldn’t figure out what it had to do with the bones. “Bread crumbs to what, Papa?”
“The truth. Someday, we will find all the bones like these. They will mark a path, just like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs, and we will finally know how we became what we are… and what we are destined to become.”
He squatted down to look her in the eye. “The bones are pieces of a puzzle, left for us to find someday—when we are ready to put them together, when our technology can unravel the mystery. It will be the greatest discovery of all time. We only need to find the pieces. Would you like to help me search for them?”
Adeline nodded.
“Someday we will. But right now, the world is like the woods in Hansel and Gretel. Dangerous. You’ve seen the wolves.”
She knitted her eyebrows.
He smiled. “The mean man on the train.” He tucked her hair behind her ear. “But they will never harm you. When your mother wakes, she will take you to a city on the sea, and you’ll sail away, to another city on the sea, in a faraway place that your mother knows well.”
He gripped her shoulders. “You’ll return when it’s safe.”
“And you’re coming with us.”
He said nothing.
She shook her head.
He gripped her tighter. “I can’t.”
“Why, Papa?”
“They want my work. They would chase me to the end of the Earth for it. I’ll go back to Berlin, and hide what I’ve found. And wait. You and your mother will return when the world is out of the woods. And we’ll go off and find the rest of the bread crumbs. Together.”
Chapter 1
The shouts woke Dr. Peyton Shaw. She reached down and tucked the heavy wool blanket into her sides, trying to get warmer. A space heater buzzed a few feet away, but the small office was still frigid.
Beyond the closed door, the shouts turned to excited conversation. Peyton caught only phrases.
“No genomic match.”
“Definitely not a Neanderthal.”
“… a new human species.”
The office’s only window was a wide piece of plate glass that looked out on the ship’s cargo hold. The cavernous space had been converted into a research lab for the mission, and it was always teeming with activity. The glow of fluorescent lamps seeped into the office, casting it in a pale light, like the streets of London on a foggy night. Peyton wanted to go out and see what the commotion was about, but she was still exhausted from her last dive to the shipwreck. So she lay in bed and listened, her eyes drifting to the walls covered with photographs of bones and dead bodies. It looked like a crime scene investigation was underway.
Peyton was used to investigations and uncomfortable quarters. She had spent her life investigating outbreaks in hot zones around the world. The biggest challenge of her career had come last month, when the X1 pandemic had ravaged the world. Billions were infected. Thirty million had died, including many of Peyton’s colleagues at the CDC and students in her EIS program. The losses had been hard, especially once she learned the truth about the deadly event.
In the course of tracing the pandemic, Peyton had learned that the outbreak was an act of bioterrorism. Yuri Pachenko and his organization, the Citium, had unleashed the pathogen on the world for one reason: to offer a cure. But the cure was more than it seemed. It stopped the pathogen, but it also contained a nanotechnology called Rapture.
Little was known about Rapture, other than that it was part of a larger device called the Looking Glass. When combined with two other technologies, Rook and Rendition, Rapture and the Looking Glass would give Yuri control of every person on Earth.
Already struggling in the wake of the millions of deaths caused by the pandemic, governments around the world were now desperate to prevent the completion of the Looking Glass. They were searching the world for the Citium, but they had very few leads to go on, and that search had been fruitless so far.
Lin Shaw, Peyton’s mother, had offered another solution. She insisted that the only hope of stopping Yuri lay in the research from a competing Citium project. That research was aboard the Beagle, a Citium submarine that Yuri had sunk thirty years ago. Lin had served on the Beagle and was more knowledgeable about the vessel than anyone alive. She believed the data and samples aboard the submarine would reveal a code buried in the human genome, and a revelation that would rewrite human history.
Many remained skeptical of Lin’s claims, and for good reason: until recently, she had been a member of the Citium. She had also been cryptic and unwilling to share what she knew. But her promise was good enough for Peyton. If there was even a chance that the research on the Beagle would stop Yuri and the Looking Glass, Peyton would go to the ends of the Earth to find it. In a way, she had.
Two weeks ago, in Alaska, she, along with her mother, had boarded a Russian icebreaker, the Arktika, and sailed north toward the Arctic Circle. Four days into the voyage, everyone gathered on the deck to watch the sun slip past the horizon for the last time. They worked in darkness after that, the sun never rising. It was as if they were a ship out of time, in another dimension, where the laws of the planet didn’t apply. The only natural light came from the aurora borealis, which made the place feel even more alien. Its phosphorescent green, blue, and orange streaks reminded Peyton of the first time she saw them—a mere three weeks ago, on the Shetland Islands. She had reunited with her father there. And spent time with Desmond Hughes after thirteen years. That seemed like a different lifetime now. A dream. And a good one.
For the researchers on the Arktika, this mission was about stopping the Citium and making a scientific discovery of historic proportions. For Peyton, it was about that as well—but also much more. Yuri and the Citium had taken both her father, her brother, and Desmond from her. Her father they had killed; Desmond they had captured. The Beagle was the key to stopping the Citium, but she hoped it would lead her back to Desmond. Her mother had promised her that it would.
Peyton rolled onto her side and looked up at the longest wall of the office, half of which was covered with a map of the sub. Sections they had explored were highlighted, yet although they had been making dives from the Arktika to the Beagle for ten days now, and cataloging everything they found, they’d still explored less than half of the massive nuclear submarine.
Below the map was the decrepit coffee machine. Peyton desperately wanted a cup, but she didn’t dare turn the noisy thing on. Her mother lay only a few feet away, on the other small bed in the office, sleeping soundly. Lin had slept very little of late—and she had barely allowed anyone else to, either.
Peyton threw the blanket off and pulled a thick sweater on. She slipped into her pants and placed a small glass heart in her pocket. The item was the only personal effect she had brought with her from Atlanta. It was all she had left of Desmond. She carried it with her to remind her why she was here—and to keep going, no matter what.
Quietly, she opened the door and stepped out into the ship’s cargo hold, squinting momentarily at the bright lights. A bank of computer stations lay just beyond the office, with a dozen technicians peering at large screens, typing, sipping coffee, and occasionally leaning back in their task chairs. Five research scientists hovered over them, pointing at the images and text displayed.
“Could have diverged before AMH.”
“Or an isolated population—i.e. floresiensis.”
“We could call it Homo beagalis—”
“We’re not naming anything yet, ladies and gentlemen. It’s specimen 1644—that’s what the researchers on the Beagle labeled it, and that’s its name for now.”
Peyton recognized the last voice: Dr. Nigel Greene. He was an evolutionary biologist leading the team analyzing the samples brought up from the Beagle.
At the sound of Peyton’s footfalls on the metal floor, he turned and, seeing her, immediately smiled.
“Sounds like you all won the Super Bowl,” she said.
The British scientist cocked his head. “What’s that?”
“Nothing.” She nodded toward the screens. “Found something?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Indeed.”
Nigel made a show of telling the other scientists and techs to “carry on,” then lightly touched Peyton’s back, corralling her to an empty computer workstation. He spoke in a hushed tone, as if what he was about to say was a closely held secret.
“We just received the first data set back from Rubicon. The samples from specimen group one are all from extinct species—as your mother predicted.” He leaned over and worked the computer, pulling up an image of a long bone lying in a metal case. “We suspected specimen 1642 was a femur bone from a canid species. We were right.”
An image appeared of what looked like a large wolf.
“It’s from a dire wolf. They inhabited North America from roughly 125,000 years ago until their extinction 10,000 years ago. Some of the best fossils have been found outside Los Angeles, at the La Brea Tar Pits.” Nigel studied the artist’s rendering. “They were magnificent creatures. Imagine a wolf weighing roughly 150 pounds with a massive head and jaws. They died out with the Pleistocene megafauna, near the end of the last glaciation. Or so we thought.”
